Olivia hadn’t been kidding when she assured me she’d do everything she could for Ethan. It was the Thursday before Halloween, and she came by the East Hampton house because she was out for the weekend and wanted to check in on Nicky and me.
“That’s quite the display out there,” Olivia said as she stepped inside.
Nicky had gone to HomeGoods and bought an entire shopping cart of Halloween decorations. I had no memory of her enthusiasm for Halloween when we were younger, but apparently, she had become one of those adults who lived to answer the door all night for candy-demanding children.
Once we were settled into the family room—I still couldn’t bring myself to sit in the living room, where I’d found Adam—Nicky asked Olivia if she really thought that Ethan’s trial was going to start this time. In theory, it was scheduled for next week, but it had been set over twice before.
“It’ll be Thanksgiving soon,” Nicky said, “then Christmas. You told us at the very beginning that it would be a long process. I thought it would be next year. I want this all to be over sooner rather than later, but does that mean they’re confident if they’re ready now?”
“Or they don’t want me to have more time to prepare? Or they have a hundred cases and will figure out on Monday that the timing doesn’t work. Try not to read into it either way, okay? I still feel good about where we are.”
I knew that Nicky found comfort in Olivia’s original promise that she would tell us if she thought we were going to lose.
“Just think, though,” I said. “If we really go to trial and it all goes our way, Ethan could be home for the holidays.”
The possibility didn’t even seem real. Nicky and I had each found ways of breaking out from the paralysis that had weighed on us during much of the summer, but I felt like I was living two separate lives: one where I could be a normal person doing normal things when other people were around, and one where I was in complete panic and despair the minute I was alone with the idea of having absolutely no control over what was happening to Ethan.
Nicky made the drive to Islip to see him nearly every day, but I could only visit twice a week in my status as his aunt. I could see how nearly six months of confinement had worn on him. His face still lit up when he saw me, but his affect would quickly flatten. The irreverent and persistent sense of humor that I had once tried to tame was now undetectable. It seemed as if he was ready to go back to his “room” earlier and earlier with each visit.
I was starting to worry he was going along with the visits more for us than himself at this point. It was almost as if he was resigned to his current life in the detention center, which we disrupted with reminders of the world he had lost. As far as the timing of the trial went, I didn’t know whether to hope for another delay to postpone what might be an eventual conviction, or to hope for a quick disposition so we could bring him home before this experience transformed him into a stranger.
I hugged Olivia before she left, wishing her a good weekend, realizing I knew nothing about whom she’d be spending it with. I knew nothing about her at all, really, and yet she was in many ways the most important person in my life at that moment.
Once she was gone, I told Nicky I was going to a Soul Cycle class and then might drive out to Montauk to run the loop used for the Turkey Trot on Thanksgiving morning. Two years earlier, I had placed second in my age group for the 10K, which wasn’t particularly competitive given that the loop was designed for a 5K, and only weirdos like me were willing to run it twice.
“Hard pass,” she said. “I’m going to ginsu this here pumpkin with jewelry designs for my Etsy page. Unless, of course, you want to help me.” She was at the kitchen counter with a perfectly shaped pumpkin, my best knife, and an array of jewelry parts lined up on a dish towel.
“Go to it, Holly Hobby. I’ll be back for dinner.”
Two hours later, I was catching my breath at Jake’s, the sheets piled at the foot of the bed. He used a remote control to trigger the ceiling fan.
“I remember when you didn’t want me to see you completely naked,” he said.
Those days were definitely over. I was lying in what the yogis called the dead man’s pose, arms and legs splayed. The air circulating over me felt like magic.
He turned on his side and kissed my shoulder. “God, I’ve missed you.”
We hadn’t seen each other in ten days. I tried to keep my distance when Adam was killed, but I found myself calling him over and over again about Ethan’s case. I trusted Olivia as much as I could trust someone I didn’t really know, but my inner control freak needed to run her every decision by another lawyer—which turned out to be Jake.
Before Adam died, I never allowed Jake to get too close, convincing myself he was simply a periodic escape from a temporary rough patch in my marriage. But once Adam was gone, and Jake was there for me—truly there for me—I remembered what it was like to feel not only loved but cared for. Protected. Safe. Adam and I had become broken, for reasons only we understood. And now I was the only one left, and I wasn’t going to tell anyone. It didn’t matter anymore. I was free to have a second chance—with Jake.
By July 4, we were seeing each other again. Now we actually felt like a real couple, at least when we were alone.
I didn’t realize I had fallen asleep until he was twitching next to me, muttering something about being wrong and that someone needed to stop. When it seemed like he was living inside a full-on nightmare, I shook his arm gently to wake him.
His head jerked from the pillow. “What?”
“You were having a bad dream.” I rotated to face him and wrapped my arm around his waist. “What was it? Driving off a cliff? Teeth falling out? An exam in that math class you totally forgot you enrolled in? That’s my biggie.”
He rubbed a palm against his close-cropped blond hair, as if he were trying to wake himself up. “If only it were so easy. Real-world bad dreams are much worse.”
I said nothing, wondering if he would tell me more. Real couples talked about real problems.
“It’s about that client at the firm, Gentry.”
That single word felt like a jolt of electricity up my spine. I hadn’t thought about the company for months.
“See? That’s why I hadn’t mentioned it to you. It’s a reminder of Adam.”
I assured him it was okay and that I wanted him to tell me.
“The federal government’s investigating them. A couple of employees—middle management, but high enough—got separate counsel, which means they’re probably cutting deals with the US Attorney’s Office. The hammer could drop any day with indictments of the CEO and CFO, if not the entire corporation.”
“So why the bad dream? Adam had clients get investigated and charged all the time.”
“But he was a criminal defense attorney, and I’m not.” His index finger was tracing an invisible circle on my shoulder, a distraction as he talked to his dead law partner’s widow in bed. “And we weren’t working for Gentry on a criminal matter. It was strictly M&A.”
Mergers and acquisitions. I remember telling Adam that he should have been happy about doing noncriminal, transactional work for once. After all, he had been the one complaining about being on the wrong side of the courtroom as a white-collar criminal defense attorney.
“So why is the government investigating?”
“Gentry was doing a lot of foreign deals. Sometimes the players in other countries have expectations that the United States government has a problem with.”
“Like, what kind of expectations?”
“Paying off every person up and down the line. Some people brush it under the scope of ‘cultural due diligence,’ but the feds call it bribery. One of the reasons Gentry hired us was to help them get the deal closed without crossing any lines into corruption. R&B’s got a ninety-eight percent satisfaction rate two years after closing of international M&As.”
“And you do that by helping them walk all the way up to the line?”
“Hm-mm.” His finger had stopped its rhythmic tracing. He had fallen back to sleep, just like that.
I tried to do the same, counting my breaths and timing them with his. It didn’t work.
I crawled out of bed, pulled on my T-shirt and underwear, and made my way to his kitchen. One of the many things I liked about Jake was that he had good taste. Both his apartment in the city and house in East Hampton were clean and modern, with a masculine touch, a mix of neutral colors and surprising textures. As I sat on a steel barstool and opened my laptop on his butcher countertop, I could picture myself hosting a dinner party here.
I pulled up the map page I had bookmarked on my laptop. It was the area surrounding the spot in Queens where Adam had been dropped off and picked up the last two days of his life. I had already googled every individual street address within a mile walk of the train station he had used as his Uber location, and had still not figured out where Adam had spent those hours. I had even driven there a few times, walking around with his picture, not knowing who I might show it to.
If the police had ever tried to nail down this part of the story about the ending of Adam’s life, they had never told me. My guess is that once they focused on Ethan, they stopped tracking down any leads that weren’t on the road to convicting my son.
But now Jake’s bad dream about the pending criminal investigation of Gentry had me thinking again about what I’d written off as a dead end.
I googled “FBI Kew Gardens” and knew immediately that I was right. Up popped a map with a red icon directly across from the train station. In addition to the map, I saw a photograph of the cube-shaped black glass office building I had personally walked into. It was home to a Duane Reade and a 24 Hour Fitness on the ground level, but there had been no way for me to know what was housed on the other eleven stories. When I googled the address, I had found a radiology practice, a leasing office, and a medical group.
But now I knew what to look for. There, on the website for the FBI’s New York operations, was what I’d been searching for all along: “Along with our main office in Manhattan, we have five satellite offices, known as resident agencies, in the area.” The Queens office was on Kew Gardens Road.
If midlevel company employees had been providing information to the government, maybe Gentry’s outside counsel had done the same—especially if that lawyer was a former federal prosecutor who was angry that his wife had pressured him to sell out by defending the types of people he used to put in prison. I thought about the unreturned email message I had sent to Carol and Roger Mercer, the Gentry Group’s in-house lawyer. I had written it off as a sign that they were either busy or had no information to provide, but now I wondered if my question about Adam’s nonexistent meeting with Gentry had struck a nerve.
I heard the slapping sound of bare feet against tile behind me. “You look good half naked in my kitchen.”
I leaned my head back to accept a kiss.
“Is that your book?”
I was still on the masthead as the EIC of Eve, but I was on a leave of absence while Ethan’s trial was pending. In retrospect, I should have forced myself to maintain a schedule at the office. After all, Olivia kept reminding me that it was her job, not mine, to prepare his defense. With him in custody, there was nothing I could do other than visit him twice a week and try to give him hope that this was all temporary.
In the meantime, I had been trying to finish the memoir. The chapters about my career were done. Jake knew I had been struggling with the more personal sections. How could I sum up twenty years of feminist publishing without talking about the love I carried for the father who used to hit my mom when he drank too much, or the resentment I had for the mother who, in my view, had not done enough to protect herself or her daughters? And now that everyone knew the backstory to my marriage, I needed to write about my relationship with Nicky as well.
“I’m starting to think the advance wasn’t enough,” I joked. “Hey, that thing you said about Gentry being investigated? Take a look at this.”
I pushed my laptop over so he could see the map on the screen. “The FBI has an office in Queens, right next to that train station.” He knew I’d been trying to figure out where Adam had been those two days.
“Are you sure? The field office is in Manhattan.”
“Sorry, not the actual field office, but like a branch. I think it’s called a resident agency.”
He shrugged. “Shows what I know about criminal law.”
“Is it possible that’s the office that was investigating Gentry?”
“I don’t think so. Our contacts have been with the Southern District.”
I knew from Adam’s prior employment there that the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District covered Manhattan and the areas north, while Queens and Brooklyn fell into the Eastern District.
“Can you find out?”
“What’s this all about?”
“Maybe Adam was providing information to the FBI about Gentry.”
“That would be a blatant ethical violation. He would have been disbarred.”
Would Adam have cared? I was probably the only person who knew just how much Adam had been struggling since he’d taken that job at Rives & Braddock. He didn’t feel like the good guy anymore. It’s like he’d become another person.
“But let’s say he was willing to break all the rules. Was Gentry doing something that, in Adam’s mind, would have warranted it? Just how much of a threat was Adam to that company?”
“I’m really sorry, Chloe, but I can’t have this conversation with you. I don’t break the rules, not even for you.”
“So what should I do with this information?” I gestured toward my laptop. “This could be what got Adam killed. It proves that Ethan’s innocent.”
He pulled me close and kissed the top of my head. “I can’t be the one you talk to about this.”
I woke up in my own bed the following morning to the remote sound of Nicky yelling my name.
I pulled on my pajama pants and found her heading in my direction in the hallway. Behind her, I could see mountains of bagged candy on the kitchen island. “Happy Halloween,” I groused, not remembering a time when Nicky had beaten me out of bed.
“I don’t think so. There’s a guy on the front porch who said he’ll wait for you all day if he has to.”
The guy was a process server, and he had a subpoena for me. I was on the prosecution’s witness list for Ethan’s trial.